Translating Feuerbach

Abstract

The domain in which writers and thinkers live and move and have their being is stocked with names and texts, and structured by multiple relations of intertextuality and production and power. But it is also structured by affective relations of one sort and another. One sort of affective relation that may be in play is the sort that leads to Festschriften, where warmth and esteem and affection in the plain ordinary-language sense link the contributors to the person honored, the person once referred to rather quaintly by a German friend of mine, in another context, as “the jubilee” - that is, the one jubilated or rejoiced in on the festive occasion in question. Marx Wartofsky has always seemed to me a jubilant sort of person, in a nice way, and it’s a pleasure to acknowledge my own affective involvement in this common enterprise.